Attorney General Reno: I want to thank you.
I want to thank you for sending America wonderful lawyers.
For seven and a half years, I have had a special vantage
point upon which to view your work in contact with many
lawyers across this land in so many different capacities.

This has been a wonderful challenge for me to
try to use the law in these seven and a half years to make
America freer, safer, healthier and to give its people in any
way I can a more positive future. In seeing lawyers in
action, I say what I have said several times in these last
years. I have never been so proud to be a lawyer in America.
Thank you for sending them out with stars in their eyes and a
touch of idealism mixed with excellence in their scholarship.

You have done so much in preparing them for
traditional roles that lawyers occupy, transactional lawyers,
as I prefer to describe the roles, protectors or advocates
and defenders, problem solvers and peacemakers. But the new
lawyers come a little subdued because I think they're worried
that their idealism will become tarnished and that will begin
to wear off.

I think they come to law school thinking they
can change the world and they begin to wonder, halfway
through law school. They want to be the vision and the
spirit that brings America together, that provides permanent
solutions to large problems and small. You who teach in the
law schools of America have a rare opportunity in this
moment; an opportunity to lead the way, to shape America.
How?

First of all, to bring disciplines together.
Lawyers are not going to involve the great problems of this
nation working in isolation. They will solve their problems
working with public health specialists and lawyers together,
and better that we learn in law school than have to learn
over the last 35 years as I have been learning from public
health experts about what to do about children.

Information technology and the law are
absolutely critical partners. Better that we learn in law
school and at the university than we learn by trial and error
as we prepare America for the cyber age.

Lawyers, though, are the common denominator.
There is no other profession that links through the various
disciplines and the various problems that we confront as do
lawyers. Your preparation of lawyers in that spirit can make
such a difference. We must do more in terms of
problem-solving and peacemaking. Problem solving in terms of
the grand vision but problem-solving in terms of that lady
who can't get that landlord to fix the toilet and her world
is falling apart.

I suggest to you that you've got to teach our
young lawyers how to finance what they do. I have never seen
course work in appropriations processes and I would give
anything for it in these last seven and a half years.

(Laughter.)

Attorney General Reno: And if you can figure
it out, you will confirm my faith in American law school
professors.

(Laughter.)

Attorney General Reno: But not just the
appropriations process. I sued a housing authority, I get a
judgment against the housing authority, they say they can't
afford it, Your Honor, we don't have any money, it's a matter
of money. We've got to teach lawyers about vacancy rates and
if we reduce vacancy rates, we will increase income and we
will be able to devote attention to infrastructure and, if we
don't have enough money, we can learn how to get grants to
get the money to improve the infrastructure, to develop
user-friendly capacities within the housing authority that
can make a difference. Lawyers too often don't know how to
translate that judgment into action because they don't know
the money issues involved.

But most of all, you're here today to engage
in what I think is one of the most important efforts afoot in
America today: To bring all Americans to the legal
profession, to legal education and to bring access to the law
to all Americans. Make no mistake, what you do here to
achieve diversity in legal education, in the legal profession
of all the courts of America and access to justice for all
Americans can have a profound impact on this nation for many
years to come.

And you're already beginning to have an
impact. Last January, I opened it up, after I had finished
speaking, to the questions and to answers to my questions.
If you were the attorney general of the United States, what
would you do to improve diversity and improve support for
American legal education? I think the first person that
answered said, why don't you write to U.S. News and World
Report.

(Laughter.)

(Applause.)

Attorney General Reno: Eric Holder, my
distinguished deputy attorney general, and I did write to
U.S. News and World Report and they did not publish the
letter so I'm going to read it.

"To the editor, the first academic year of
the new century is nearly upon us. We believe that in the
future, U.S. News and World Report can even before assist
students by including a schools commitment to diversity in
your annual law school rankings. Currently when you
determine the rankings of law school, you give weights to
other factors. We believe that your criteria would be even
further enhanced if you were to consider factors such as law
school student body diversity and faculty diversity, the
quality of its loan forgiveness program, how well a law
school trains its students to provide increased access to
legal services for disadvantaged communities.

"One of the most important lessons we have
learned in our services as attorney general and deputy
attorney general and throughout our legal careers is the
extraordinary value of diversity in the legal profession.
Diversity makes the profession more effective. Diversity
among judges and lawyers help the justice system look like
the communities it serves, a factor that can increase public
confidence in the even-handedness and accessibility of our
legal system. Diversity in a law school can bring a range of
real world issues and viewpoints into the classroom and, as
some studies have shown, increase the number of attorneys who
graduate and serve minority and other underserved
communities.

"As Justice Lewis Powell stated 22 years ago,
the nation's future depends on leaders trained through wide
exposure to ideas and morays of students as diverse as the
nation of many peoples. By including diversity in your
annual law school ranking system, we believe you will perform
a valuable service to our nation's law students, law schools
and legal profession in the 21st Century."

We got an answer.

"Dear Madam Attorney General, thank you for
your thoughtful letter from you and the Attorney General
Holder about the U.S. News law school rankings. In our
frequent conversations with officials of both graduates and
undergraduate institutions, we regularly hear the view that
diversity is an important component of the education process.
For that reason, we do rank undergraduate institutions on the
diversity of their campuses and publish these diversity
rankings.

"We understand that such information is
useful to students. We are discussing whether it makes sense
to publish a separate table for select graduate schools
similar to the diversity listings in our undergraduate guide.
We will take your thoughts to heart as we work towards an
answer."

While they're working towards an answer, I
think we should prepare the answer for them and this is my
answer.

Let us act. Let us let all America know why
diversity is critical. And I would like to suggest at least
four reasons that I think we should put in form and substance
that can make it understandable for all America.

The first, we must not take our democracy for
granted. As I have cited to some of you, on the east wall of
the Justice Building in Washington is the following
inscription: The common law is the will of mankind issuing
from the life of the people framed through mutual confidence
and sanctioned by the light of reason. To be real, to mean
something in a democracy and in a rule of law, the law must
include the will of all the people. It must issue from the
lives of all the people. It must be framed by the mutual
confidence of all the people.

But in this great country, too many people
are left out, left out of the profession and excluded from
access to the law and to necessary legal services.

The results: Anger, frustration, a lack of
confidence in the law and a conclusion that the law is
ineffective and that it does not work.

Over 100 years after Abraham Lincoln warned
that a house divided against itself cannot stand, certain
segments of our society are isolated and less inclined to
think of themselves as engaged in a common struggle. This is
a sad reality but one we must acknowledge and confront.
Whether you look at hate crimes, racial profiling or the
treatment that minorities face in the workplace or on the
streets or the obvious and sometimes voluntary segregation in
our cities and suburban neighborhoods, it is evident that
many people in our country on both sides of the racial divide
still do not believe that the law speaks for them.

How do we escape this legacy? How is
progress possible? I believe that one of the ways to
overcome racial divisiveness is to focus on equality and
diversity in our schools, our law schools and in all our
educational opportunities. It is in these places that we
plant the seeds of positive change.

How can we believe that we are truly
preparing our students for the future? We must restore
confidence in the law by making sure that the law issues from
the life of all the people, not just a few. When there is a
legal solution, we must try to solve all the people's
problems or otherwise risk having a system in which our
people feel defeated, hopeless and disenfranchised.

One of the great joys of my office has been
to welcome ministers of justice from emerging democracies
around the world or to greet those of established
democracies, but then to read in the paper shortly thereafter
that the democracy is in turmoil because too many people have
been left out in the voices of government and in the
opportunities for its people.

We must not take democracy for granted. We
must cherish it. We must understand that in a flash, what we
hold so dear can be at risk, as we have seen in other
nations. And we must make sure that the voices of all our
people are heard. That can best be done by making sure the
voices of all of the people are heard in the legal profession
and in access to justice.

Secondly, America must be able to compete in
a diverse world. The need to find and implement solutions to
diversify legal thinking and to diversify this profession
becomes even more urgent when you consider the rapidly
changing demographics of the United States. Within the next
few decades, this country will boast one of the most diverse
populations in terms of race, ethnicity, language and culture
in the world. What an exciting opportunity and what a
wonderful time to participate. What a challenge this will be
to make sure that we leave nobody behind and that we, as a
nation, are not left behind because of our inability to
compete in a diverse world.

We cannot prepare our students for life
professionally and personally if our schools do not include a
cross-section of students that bare a resemblance to the
world around us. If our diverse and often divided democratic
republic is to survive and flourish, we must cultivate common
spaces where citizens from every corner of society can come
together to learn how to live together, to do business
together, to learn how others think and feel.

Education depends on dialogue, not just
between student and teacher but between classmates. Exposure
to differing perspectives is both enlightening and
stimulating. It encourages students to question and to
challenge themselves and to challenge others. As students
develop mutual respect, they learn to communicate across
cultural barriers and they negotiate their differences.

Thirdly, our nation must be at full strength
if we are to maintain this nation as one of the great nations
of the world. We import skills as we fail to use the wisdom
and the strength of all Americans because we do not give them
opportunity. We search for overseas markets as we ignore
potential consumers who could be empowered by lawyers who
solve their problems and make their dreams come true if only
we had enough lawyers in the profession representing all
America.

Fourth, experience in a diverse world makes
us all better lawyers and better people. The prosecutor who
is interested in securing justice can do it best by building
rapport and understanding with the victim, witnesses, with
the juror, with all with whom he comes in contact with. The
business lawyer must do the same as his client expands into a
new market. Diversity builds understanding. It builds
trust. It builds communication. It builds community. It
builds a spirit that is America and that is its strength.

Thus, the next question is, how do we move
forward? First, we need to move beyond our tendency to favor
people who remind us of ourselves. When that happens, we
perpetuate a closed system, a limited system and we lose out
on the real value of this nation: The value of diversity.
Diversity which makes us more understanding, more empathetic
and therefore more effective.

Secondly, we can't achieve diversity unless
we move beyond the hang-ups our country has about affirmative
action. Affirmative action is nothing more or less than what
we have all experienced at some time in our life. I am a
product of affirmative action. My father was a newspaper
reporter who knew the sheriff who gave me a summer job the
summer I graduated from high school.

(Applause.)

Attorney General Reno: My affirmative action
was a grandfather who was a lawyer who told my mother to stop
discouraging me when she said ladies didn't become lawyers.
My affirmative action was a chief judge who told me father
who said, "I'll let you go to law school if Judge Weishardt
says that it's okay." He took me down to Judge Weishardt and
Judge Weishardt said, "Henry, this town has too many lawyers
but what it needs more than anything else is good lawyers. If
she can be a good lawyer, let her go to law school."

Too many people don't have a grandfather who
was a lawyer, a father who knows the sheriff or a father who
can take you to the chief judge. There is affirmative action
for them in other forms.

In recent years, many of you have been
involved in court and in the nationwide debate on the issue
of affirmative action in higher education. The Department of
Justice has filed amicus briefs in a number of cases
including a recent case involving the University of
Michigan's affirmative action program to promote diversity.

I continue to believe that our federal
constitution allows race to be used as a factor in university
admissions in a program that is carefully designed to use
race only as much as is necessary to meet the university's
goals of diversity and/or to remedy past discrimination.

(Applause.)

Attorney General Reno: Without consideration
of racial diversity in higher education admissions, we will
likely have college or university classrooms with far fewer
minority students. William Bowen and Eric Bach have
estimated that if selective colleges and universities no
longer considered race and/or ethnicity in their admissions,
the number of black undergraduates would shrink from
approximately 7 percent to 2 percent or less.

This severe reduction in educational
opportunity on the college level would translate into even
fewer minority judges, law professors and practitioners in
our future. We are all the beneficiaries of affirmative
action but we need more people to help others along the way.
In the same way that we were guided. And I think we need to
start much earlier in the life of our populus.

I wonder why we wait until the university and
until law school to start fussing about affirmative action
when we should have started a lot earlier in zero to 3 and
building the foundation of human life that gives a solid
foundation in learning, a solid foundation in the concept of
reward and punishment and the conscience. That's where
vision comes in.

Teach your law students that they can create,
in communities, programs and initiatives that give the
children of that community and indeed this nation a healthy
start, a safe start and a start where people read to them and
give them the foundations upon which to grow as strong and
constructive human beings.

You have sent some wonderful lawyers out into
this field in America. I've watched them. They care so much
and they are doing so much. Encourage others to know that
they can make a difference using the law the right way.

As many of you are aware, in 1999, President
Clinton issued a call to action to the legal community. He
asked us to diversify this profession and to work on ways to
improve the quality and quantity of legal services in
underserved communities. He directed Eric Holder, the deputy
attorney general, to monitor this effort and a working group
of lawyers from America took on the task to responding to the
president's call.

A year and a half later, after a lot of hard
work in which some of you here were directly involved,
Lawyers for One America has issued a report that contains a
variety of best practices and model programs that each sector
can incorporate in order to reach these goals.

The report also sets forth recommendations,
some of which are directed to the legal education community.
These include the recommendation that you strengthen your
affirmative action programs, rely less on LSAT scores and
reach out to younger students and guide them into the
pipeline to a legal career. I applaud everyone who was a
part of this effort and encourage others to take a close look
at this report.

What I understand is one of the most
promising outcomes of the Lawyer for One America effort is a
program that is currently being developed that has as its
mission mentoring and providing scholarships to minority
children who have an interest in entering the legal
profession. The most interesting and notable aspect of this
project is that it intends to target children of all ages
starting with children in elementary school. The idea is to
take interested children by the hand throughout their
educational careers and give them the access to skills and
opportunities that they will need in order to choose law
school and law as their ultimate career.

Now, I understand that engineers have been
doing this for 20 years with some great success. We're
better than engineers.

(Laughter.)

Attorney General Reno: But as I was
preparing to come here, I noticed that I don't have someone
for you to contact to find out more about it, and maybe you
already know enough about it but I don't think it even has a
name yet. But I think we should find out more about it and
use the experience of engineers, use the experience of others
to reach out and make a difference. And if the program
doesn't get off the ground, why don't you get your alumni in
a particular community organized to do something about it?
Each one of us can make a difference.

I don't know how many of you have
students/children who are in elementary school or remember
when you did or have been there recently. But you go to an
elementary school and you see the enthusiasm in the
kindergarten. You see the excitement in the first and second
grade. The third and fourth, they're beginning to drift off.
They're beginning to act out. You can see the signs.

And then you see what can be done if you
tutor them. If you're a mentor, you can keep them on the
straight and narrow. And then by the time the sixth and
seventh grade rolls around, if you've been going to the same
elementary school over the past seven years, you see those
that have gotten into trouble. And sometimes it breaks your
heart more than others because he was so bright and he is so
sharp and he would make such a lawyer or a doctor.

We've got to reach out through organized
efforts in our colleges, universities and law schools, to
join with community groups, with groups such as the National
Urban League to develop partnerships that give them
opportunity.

I get fussed at a little bit when I raise
this next issue. If we're going to identify the best people
for law school, we're going to have to take time to look
beyond test scores and things that are easily assessed, to
look into the spirit and the mind and the heart of the
applicants to our law schools. Problems are not going to be
solved by test scores alone. Problems will be solved for
clients by people who have had experience, who have the
heart, who have been through the crucible of human existence
and come out with the knowledge and understanding that
sometimes staggers the imagination.

(Applause.)

Attorney General Reno: When you focus only
on numbers, you miss a tremendous amount of talent. You miss
an opportunity in the same way potential law school
applicants miss opportunities if they look just at rankings.
It takes time and real effort to try and figure out who is
going to make the most of an educational opportunity, who is
going to excel in the corporate practice or who is going to
make a fair and effective judge but it is time well spent.

And when I refer to judges, being a judge is
very special. We need diversity on the bench but we need to
do something with our courts. And again, I think law schools
can lead the way.

Over 10 years ago, we established a drug
court in Miami with a judge who cared and knew what he was
talking about, a caseload that was small enough so that he
knew the people and not just by numbers or by files, with
resources sufficient to match the needs for treatment, for
follow-up job training and placement. Five of us worked
together to establish that drug court. It was a battle. We
had it evaluated to make sure that it was working. We got
back good evaluations.

There are now over 400 drug courts in the
country operating on somewhat the same theory of a carrot and
stick approach of treatment, support, job training and
placement but more certain sanctions every step of the way if
you failed to live up to the terms of the court.

Just think of what we can do with a diverse
bench in America, with people who understand the mental
health and what can be done to treat it, dealing with people
who have mental problems, what can be done with juvenile
delinquents if we have courts with the time to spend on the
children and with resources to match the children's problems,
what we can do with abuse and neglect.

And just think of what law schools could do
across this country if you organized on a regional basis to
have the best law school or one law school assigned to
teaching juvenile court judges and another assigned to
teaching domestic violence judges. Law schools can do a lot
more in terms of preparing our judges for the multiplicity of
problems and the legal issues that they confront.

A lawyer who is interested in trust building
and serving people and solving their problems can't be
identified just by test scores. That's why diversity is part
of the assessment of what kind of skills is really important.
What more can we do?

We can focus on what is becoming a forgotten,
though they will not let themselves be forgotten because they
act out in anger, but a segment of our population that has
talent, that has skill, that has so much to offer this nation
if we will provide it the key and unlock the door and let
them back in. Young men ages 18 to 35 who are coming back to
communities across America.

Total number of prisoners coming back from
our prisons and our jails each year for the next four or five
years will be 500,000 people a year. Coming back to the
apartment over the open air drug market where they got into
trouble in the first place. Back to the apartment over the
open air drug market where they first dreamed of being a
lawyer and wanted to be a lawyer to right wrongs and to make
a difference but got in with the wrong crowd because there
was not supervision or people were struggling to make ends
meet because they did not have equal opportunity.

25 percent of young African-American men in
America today have been in some form of custody, prison,
jail, probation. They have served their time. We're
developing re-entry courts that will help them re-enter and
re-entry partnerships that will help them re-enter society
with a chance of getting off on the right foot, of building
partnerships that bring them back, partnerships with
churches, with NGOs, with community groups, with a police
officer who has reached out, but partnerships that help them
make the transition back to the community.

Two weeks ago, I was walking in an area of
Washington, looking at different types of architecture and
how communities change and three men on the corner saw me,
saw first the detail and then said, "Uh-oh." Then they saw
me and they said, "Hello, Ms. Reno." And one of them
bicycled over to me and he said, "I just got out of prison
after 19 years. Will you buy me a sandwich?"

I said, "I'm sorry, sir, I left my purse at
home."

He said, "I love you anyway."

I said, "Tell me what to do to keep you from
going back."

He said, "Don't worry about me, I'm too far
gone. See that building across the street that's all run
down? Get somebody in there and get it rehabed and get these
kids off the street so they don't follow me in the same way."

I refuse to give up on that man. I think we
can make a difference. And for many of these people, we can
make a difference by telling them that their dreams can come
true, for Winston Churchill said, "There is a treasure in the
heart of every man if you work and look long enough to find
it." For so many, there are broken dreams that can be
repaired.

The next thing I think you can do, and you're
already doing so much, is to teach diversity training. So
many people come out into the real world in the practice of
law and get their egos bruised unexpectedly through diversity
training in the real world when a colleague tells them what
for and they just don't understand and would they please get
a little bit more sensitive and sympathetic to situations.
Think of what law schools can do if you had diversity
training in law schools, diversity training with respect to
so many different issues. You could make such a difference.

But the real reason for doing all of this is
that diversity makes us all such much better people. You go
to a black church and someone sings "Steel Away" as you have
never heard it sung before and there is no moment like that
that you will ever have again.

You are blamed by an entire community for the
results in a trial, the McDuffy case, and the community
erupts in anger, calls for your resignation and tells you
that you must leave office to prevent further deaths. That
Sunday night, I told them that I could not leave office
because that would be to give in to anarchy and the way you
remove people from office was to boot them out in an
election, and I had to qualify for office in a month and that
would be the way to get me out of office. Nobody ran against
me. My mother said it was because nobody wanted the job.

(Laughter.)

Attorney General Reno: But shortly
thereafter, I went to my first meeting at the Kaleb Center in
Liberty City and for five hours people hollered at me and
fussed at me. And then they came up to me as they were
leaving during the course of the evening, because I was not
going to be the first one out, and they would pat me on the
shoulder. And then the next time I would see them, they
would talk softly to me. And then they would call me and
give me a piece of their mind because I had done something
wrong. The police chief said I went to more meetings. He
said, "If there are two people, Janet will go talk to them,"
because I learned.

And then I could walk the length of the
Martin Luther King parade and have people say, "Child
support, child support" and mothers say, "What's child
support? Why are they saying that?"

I say, "I collect child support." Remember
the rap song? They wrote a rap song about me.

She said, "There is a boo."

I said, "I'm probably prosecuting him."

And when I went with the President to
dedicate a new church to replace one burnt out by arson and
we drove down the little dirt road past the site of the burnt
down church where only an old wonderful priest stood and then
came to the brand-new church. And after we had finished
dedicating it, we came down off the dais and a lady burst
through the rope line saying, Janet, Janet, how are you? I
haven't seen you since Miami. Hurricane Andrew drove us up
here. She said, "You got me child support and I've never
forgotten it.

" And she said, "And these are the two you got
me child support for"(looking up).

(Laughter.)

Attorney General Reno: Two grown men doing
well, leading a good and positive life.

But then there are more disappointments. And
in the hours and weeks that led up to April 22nd of this year
and in the weeks that have followed, a community that I love
is in part at odds with me. And it is so frustrating not to
be able to go home and start talking again and going to
meetings and being hollered at and fussed at by some
wonderful people and trying to build bridges again.

Because of the people in my community, I
hope, at least I feel I've got to be a better person for
their contribution, for their helping to forge better
understandings. We can do so much more if we work together,
if we listen to the music of each other, if we listen to the
sounds of where we came from and together build America. You
who lead our law schools have one of the greatest
opportunities of anybody right now to take that idealism that
has walked through your door this first September and give
that idealism substance. Give it the tools but let it go out
and let it go out armed with the knowledge of the diversity
of America and the strength and the wonder that it can bring
to that idealism. Teach them to trust the people, to trust
all the people. Thank you.

(Applause.)

Attorney General Reno: I've got to ask you a
question. Can I?

Mr. Olivas: Yes, of course.

Attorney General Reno: If you were the
attorney general in the United States, what would you do? I
would be happy to try to answer questions but I would love to
hear any answer to that question.

Mr. Sylver: My name is Peter Sylver. I'm
the dean for admissions of Hofstra Law School and I wouldn't
presume to kind of decide what you're going to do with your
next phase or role in your professional career but I don't
have a question. I just have an invitation. I'm in the
middle of the first days of a dean search.

(Laughter/applause.)

Mr. Sylver: So I would just love to invite
you to come and join us in this effort.

Attorney General Reno: I've been like
Scarlet and I'm thinking about that tomorrow so I don't run
into any ethical issues. But I will tell you this. I think
the law school deans I've known have the hardest job of
anybody I know, even attorneys general.

Ms. Yu: Diane Yu, Chair of the Section of
Legal Education. What is going to happen within the Attorney
General's office to the Lawyers for One America report now
that it's out? Is there some hope for some continuity or is
it going to be spread out to other agencies?

Attorney General Reno: I resolved on the way
out, as I was trying to find out what the continuity was,
that I'm going to make sure as soon as I get back that there
is continuity to it. And anybody that has any suggestions,
let me know. But there is an awful lot in there as I skimmed
through it and I just want to make sure.

Sustainability is one of the keys to
everything that we do because we come up with great reports
and there is a tendency to put them on a shelf. I'm
identifying the reports that I think are useful and they're
going to be on a shelf right by my desk, one that I can
easily get to, because they can have such a profound impact
and we cannot forget it.

Ms. Magee Andrews: Hi. My name is Rhonda
Magee Andrews. I teach at the University of San Francisco.
I recently had a conversation with a new colleague, who
happens to be white, teaching at USF, just coming on board.
And he remarked to me that he used to be very active on
racial issues and is still very interested and committed but
is fairly pessimistic right now when he looks around and sees
kind of where we are today.

I'm wondering how it is that you have kept
from being pessimistic about sort of the prospects for real
change given some of the ways that I think we can validly
critique the results, if you will, of the our civil rights
movement and struggle of the '60s.

Attorney General Reno: One of the reasons I
think I have kept my optimism is maybe I'm a damn fool. But
basically I served as state attorney of Miami for 15 years
during some of the most tumultuous times. There is a
tendency for people to go into an office and stay one term,
maybe two terms and then move on and you get some great press
at the outset but then you get the slightest narrows of your
mistakes because you can't blame it on the guy before you.

But you also see the victories, the small,
gentle victories, the great victories. You're stopped by the
guy on the escalator in a downtown office building and he
says, "I want to thank you."

"What for, sir?"

"You arrested me."

I said, "Sir, I didn't arrest you."

(Laughter.)

Attorney General Reno: "You're right, he
said, but your prosecutors gave me the opportunity for
treatment after I had a terrible drug problem, my family had
left me, I lost my job, I had hit rock bottom, I couldn't
afford any treatment and I got arrested and they got me into
treatment. I've been drug free for two years, I've got my
family back and I can't thank you enough."

Those times just give you another nine miles
an hour.

The little girl who comes in to thank you
because the prosecutors have been so kind to her in a sex
battery case in which she was the victim. Those are the
things that just keep you going.

To see an office change and minority lawyers
come on board as a result of your recruiting efforts and also
because of the efforts of some heroic deans who really fought
hard and recruited hard back in the early '80s and to see the
difference that they made in that office and now to see them
as prominent lawyers downtown with downtown firms, to see
them prominent members of the bench. You see the successes,
and I think that's why community is so important.

You have sometimes two steps forward and
three steps back. My mother told me that I should get into
public service before she decided that my sister and I should
be disco dancers rather than a county commissioner and a
state attorney because she didn't like electoral politics.
She always encouraged me to go into public service to make
this world a better world.

When I was 13, I had the opportunity to spend
a year with my uncle who was with the Allied High Commission
Forces in Germany. We drove by Dachau you before it was open
to the public and I had heard descriptions but it became
vivid because there it was and that it could happen in my
lifetime. And I realized that probably one of the most
horrible, evil people in the history of the world lived
during my lifetime.

I then had the chance to see England and to
see Stonehenge and Bath 2,000 years old almost and Winchester
Cathedral a thousand years old and I thought, hmm, I don't
know anything that's going to last this long. And I thought
to myself, things probably aren't getting any better but
unless you try real hard, they're going to get a lot worse.
And I think that's what keeps me going.

But most of all, what keeps me going are the
people and you learn the tragedies. You somehow learn to
cope with them. Oklahoma City is one where we reached out,
where we came to know the survivors and to know the victims
who survived. I have on my shelf right by me in the office
the picture of a little one year-old girl who was the
granddaughter of one of the employees in the U.S. attorney's
office who was killed and JC is part of my life.

If you trust the people and if you believe in
people, you can overcome ever so much.

Mr. Olivas: We'll take one last question
from the back there.

Ms. Weaver: Madam attorney general, I work
with diversity services at American University and one of the
things we find all the time, not only with our students of
color but our students who went into public service, is their
debt burden and how that prevents them from really doing what
it is that's in their heart.

So my question to you is, what is either DOJ
or other federal agencies doing to create a federal loan
assistance program to help those students who want to get
into public service get their loans forgiven?

Attorney General Reno: We're trying to work
through that issue with Congress. I don't like to call it
loan forgiveness because I think of Roy Black with the public
defender's office and I wouldn't like to think of his loans
as being forgiven forever. So I like to think of loan
deferral in some formula or something but I very much support
it and we have been trying to work through it. I don't think
we're going to succeed in this year but I'm going to continue
to advocate for it because I was one of those that had a debt
burden that took an awful long time to overcome.

Mr. Thomas: Attorney General Reno, my name
is James Thomas and I've been the admissions director at Yale
for a long time.

(Laughter.)

Mr. Thomas: If I were attorney general --
you've given us some wonderful ideas about diversity training
in the law schools. Well, I might suggest as attorney
general that we give diversity training to every new
administration right after inauguration.

Attorney General Reno: I think that's a
wonderful idea because we've been struggling with it and
we're doing the dumb thing of having diversity training just
as we're leaving in the Justice Department. But it's
fascinating what people are learning as a result. And I
think that's a good idea. I'll carry that back. Thank you
all.